Hello here,
I concur with what you said above whatever we do to help the small validator, there will be other validator who will try to add more keys thinking they can earn more or maliciously prevent small validator to be elected
I like how you extended my original proposal to reduce the reward of folks near the lower bound only targeting the validator with keys above 5. I think the number of 5 shouldn’t be static but instead dynamic like the the proposal of this HIP 16 to limit keys with a number that is dynamically defined.
A simple calculation during the epoch election could be :
given k = total number key the validator wants to elect
if k - 1 or k - 2 give him a stake per key below the upper bound (smartstake is already doing that by the way), then reduce its reward. This could be proportional to the number of keys it could have removed (ie 5%, 10%, etc …)
so yeah I would definitely support that idea, can you maybe create a HIP 17 so we don’t mix that HIP 16 with this fantastic idea.
On the max key limit, I believe it still required because of the risk of a validator over taking a given shard (ie kucoin issue today)